Thirty Percent of Small Business Owners Have Tapped Into Personal Savings

About 30% of small business owners have tapped into their personal savings during the COVID-19 crisis to avoid going bust, according to a new survey conducted by Expertise.com in association with YouGov.

The poll surveyed 510 small business owners with fewer than 100 employees.

This varied somewhat by demographic: More than 42% of Latino business owners have had to raid their personal piggy banks to keep their businesses running, compared to 33% of black business owners and 30% of white business owners.

Small businesses have “had to make tough choices about the future of their businesses,” the survey concluded. “The majority of survey respondents expressed concerns about going out of business or needing to file for bankruptcy due to the COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine.”

The survey found that 20% of respondents were worried about their business going bankrupt, another 19% fear it shutting down for good, and 41% worry about having to shut down temporarily. Around 34% said they don’t worry about any of those things.

When asked about how much cash they had to stay afloat: 26% answered one to two months, 27% said four to six months, 8.4% said seven to nine months, 7.2% said 10 months to a year, and 13% said more than a year.

Other findings:

– Surprisingly, 16.1% of respondents said that the COVID-19 outbreak had a positive impact on their business. But that wasn’t typical: More than 36% of respondents said the pandemic is somewhat negatively affecting their business, with 30% saying their business is being very negatively affected.

– The pandemic’s impact varied by geography. In the Northeast, where the pandemic has hit hardest, 78% of respondents said their businesses had been negatively impacted. By contrast, in the West, which has been not been hit as hard, 59% said their business was negatively impacted.

– Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they have lost at least half of their business. Eighteen percent of respondents said they lost between 50% and 75% of their business, and more than 12% said they have lost 75%–100% of their business.